New York flood risk getting worse and worse, study says

We already knew that New York City was on the front lines of sea level rise, but research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science finds that the Big Apple has also become a lot more susceptible to inundation from massive storms.

“We wanted to look at the impact of climate change on sea level and storm characteristics to see how that has affected the storm surge on the Atlantic coast, specifically in New York City“, said Andra Reed, graduate student in meteorology, Penn State.

Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City in 2012.

Superstorm Sandy, which killed over 70 people and caused over $50 billion in damage in the United States, followed a track similar to the one now forecast for Joaquin, according to federal data. In addition, Adam Sobel from the Columbia University said there are certainly other areas apart from New York, coastal or not, who may be experiencing the worse effects of rising sea levels in the nearest future. They found that the combination of those two factors – sea-level rise and storm surge height – has greatly increased the possibility of major storms.

“Rising sea levels contribute the greatest overall to the increasing flood heights in our study”.

“Sandy was the motivating factor”, she said.

“Imagine what six feet of sea level rise – which we can’t rule out by the end of the century if we continue with business-as-usual fossil fuel burning – would do”.

The current study, while focusing on New York, is the latest of several papers pointing to an increased risk of more frequent and devastating storms worldwide.

But they have found that in the anthropogenic era, the return period for this same storm surge height has been reduced to about 130 years. Storm surge occurs when water levels temporarily rise during a storm and weather conditions push that water ashore.

Hurricane Sandy flooded numerous traffic and subway tunnels and even breached sea walls on the south tip of Manhattan. The disaster of climate change is most acute for Earth’s island nations, a number of which now face the real risk of literally vanishing beneath the seas. It left about a million of the company’s more than 3 million customers without power in New York City and Westchester County north of the city – a few in the hardest-hit areas were in the dark for a couple of weeks. Ocean City Management Coordinator Frank Donato said his office is also getting preparing for the worst.

“Actual storm surge records don’t go back far enough to establish a pre-industrial baseline”, said Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State and a climate change advocate famous for cobbling together various types of data to create the famous “hockey stick” of global warming.

Reed, A. J., et al.